Amanda Knox Claims She's a Pawn of Italian Justice System in Memoir Waiting To Be Heard

As Amanda Knox's case once again goes to court (which will likely take some time), her memoir, Waiting To Be Heard, will be released on April 30. In it, the New York Times reports: "[Knox] says that she and Mr. Sollecito were smoking marijuana, reading a Harry Potter book aloud in German and watching the film Amélie at his apartment."

Undoubtedly, the weed smoking will provide still more unwarranted ammunition for prosecutors. Knox's first major interview with ABC News's Diane Sawyer comes right on the heels of Waiting To Be Heard's release.

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Knox, an American exchange student in Italy, was 20 years old when she, along with her boyfriend Raffaeli Sollecito, was charged with the murder of her 21-year-old roommate Meredith Kercher. Knox was acquitted in 2011 after serving four years of her 26-year sentence in Italian jail (where, she says, she contemplated suicide). However, last month, the highest court in Italy, Rome's Court of Cassation, overturned the acquittal. To determine Knox's guilt or innocence requires a thorough parsing of the cold, hard facts. Unfortunately, there aren't many.

While a third man, Rudy Guede, was convicted of Kercher's murder on the strong basis of DNA evidence, none of Knox's DNA was found at the crime scene, forensic evidence was mishandled by local cops in Perugia (where Knox and Kercher lived), Knox barely understood Italian and followed the police's orders, she later said, "like a lost, scared child." And, disturbingly, various details of Knox's sex life were used against her for the purpose of character assassination.

For instance, excerpts from Knox's diary that revealed her sexual activity, plus her possession of a vibrator, were used to attempt to convince the jury that she and Sollecito had murdered Kercher in "a sex game gone wrong." One officer even told Knox that she was HIV positive and asked her to write a list of all her sexual partners; Knox discovered later that the supposed diagnosis was a trick to get her to reveal how many men she'd slept with. She was young, attractive, a "party girl," and sexual — judgment calls that somehow became so-called "proof" in the case. The Italian media (later co-opted by America) even nicknamed her "Foxy Knoxy."

Her numb behavior in court was also framed as an unspoken admission of guilt: What was probably shock was interpreted as indifference. Kissing her boyfriend outside the courthouse was read as cavalier, rather than her later explanation that she was "feeling young and scared, in need of comfort."

On March 29, 2013, as I was putting the final touches on this article, I conducted an experiment. I Googled "Amanda Knox" and got 7.1 million hits. I then tried "Amanda Knox" and "bitch," which returned 1.7 million hits. "Amanda Knox" and "pervert" came back at 880,000 hits, and her name coupled with "slut" yielded 380,000.

However, Knox was guilty of falsely accusing a local bar owner of the murder. (This, Knox says, came after hours of police interrogation that also involved physical violence.) When he was later acquitted, the fact that she framed him worked against her, tacking on additional years to her sentence for libel.